Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
If you have evidence of criminal activity, then file charges. However, you can also be charged with filing a false police report if you are just making it up……..which is probably why you haven’t filed charges.
The Greaney retirement study remains uncorrected 21 years after I brought the error in it to the attention of the Reire Early community that met at the Motley Fool site. What more evidenve could any rational-thinking person require?
The hold-up is that today’s stock investors are highly IRRATIONAL, as shown by today’s CAPE value. We can do all sorts of wonderful things once we get past our addiction to Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” Will all of the magic begin to happen in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis? I think so. I hope so. But I don’t believe that anyone can say with absolute certainty given that we have never been in a situation like this before.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Uh oh………Wade Pfau just shot a torpedo at Rob Bennett. In a recent podcast titled “Market Timing Still Doesn’t Work”, he points out that if you tried timing the market using CAPE since the publication of Shiller’s paper, you have not done well. He then sums it up by saying that you “cannot green a whole lot of information from the CAPE ratio”.
This presentation by three experts, including Wade Pfau, shows everyone that VII has failed since the time of Shiller’s paper.
Here is the video:
https://youtu.be/OdraSSI1BFQ
I believe that one of you Goons posted a link to that talk here a ways back. I responded to it then. My general reaction was that I was glad to see people discussing the market timing issue (discussion advances knowledge) but that I was not impressed by the particular talk. It was mosely the spouting of cliches that have been heard hundreds of times before. The talk would have been much better if they had included a strong advocate of market timing. Then the back and forth would be a lot more stimulating and thought provoking.
I of course agree that timing has not worked well from 1996 forward. That’s an objective fact.
I strongly disagree that an investor cannot gain a huge amount of valuable information from the CAPE value. That’s pretty much the entire shebang. The reason why I constantly say that we need to open every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research is so we can have discussions about how to make use of all of the valuable information we can gain by looking at the CAPE value.
Wade obviously had a very, very different view of the importance of the CAPE vslue during the 16 months in which he was working with me on the research that we co-authored showing that Valuation-Informed Indexing is a far superior strategy to Buy-and-Hold. Say that stocks continue to perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past and we see a devastating Buy-and-Hold Crisis sometime in the next year or two or three. Do you think that Wade will flip back to the Valuation-Informed Indexing side of the table at that time? I do. I wish that he had never flipped to the Goon side in response to your threats to destroy his career if he did not.
I believe that lots of people will be switching to Valuation-Informed Indexing after the onset of the next crisis. Get Rich Quick strategies seem great when they are creating trillions and trillions of dollars of funny money. They don’t seem so great when the funny money goes “Poof!” and the nation of people that permitted the relentless promotion of them has to pick up the pieces of the destruction they cause.
I believe that market timing (the long-term variety) has always worked and always will work. But I do appreciate people hashing it out even when they say things to which I do not agree. We need to have more people talking about this stuff.
Rob
Obviously market timing didn’t work. We have the data. No one, but you, is going to be an advocate for a failed timing scheme.
You keep telling us that we just have to keep waiting to see if it will work. Meanwhile, buy and hold has always worked. Sorry, but this video just caps off what we already know.
…..and there goes your $500 million fantasy windfall.
Please mark me down as being 100 percent in favor of market timing/price discipline. I think it is possible to have reasonable difference of opinion as to HOW MUCH market timing/price discipline is required. But the Buy-and-Hold “idea” that there might be some alternatve universe where everything works the opposite of how it had always worked here on good old Planet Earth is far too extreme for my taste. I believe that there’s a good chance that stocks will continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past and that investors should be discussing how much market timing/price discipline to engage in at every discussion board and blog on the internet.
I think it would be fair to say that the “idea” that market timing/price discipline might not be required is really just a marketing gimmick at this point. I believe that it started out as something real back in the days when Buy-and-Hold was being developed, when Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns had not yet been publushed. But 42 years down the road it is just a dangerous and outdated marketing gimmick. If the Buy-and-Holders believed that they could present a coherent case that market timing/price discipline is not always 100 percent required for every investor, we would not see honest posting re the research banned at a single site. If Buy-and-Hold was a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would welcome challenges to their thinking.
That’s where I am coming from re this one in any event, Anonymous. My best wishes, etc.
Rob
You are free to follow your silly market timing scheme, but don’t expect other people let you promote your nonsense on their websites. People aren’t interested in being broke like you.
You only get to decide for yourself, Anonymous. Every other investor gets to decide for himself or herself That’s the way it works.
Or at least I believe that that’s the way it will work in the days and years after the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.
Rob
Actually, other people have decided as well. Others kicked you off their boards, people like Wade stopped talking to you and you wife divorced you. No one is left.
Woe is me.
I’m doomed!
Rob
The whole point of investing is to provide for a financially secure retirement. You are over the age of 60 and you are broke. It is not funny. It is as serious as a a heart attack.
It’s very cereal, Anonymous. Very cereal indeed.
Rob
Broke, divorced and stupid is no way to go through life.
Living on the wrong side of the felony line is no way to get through life either. I’d rather be on the side of the American people and be able to sleep at night.
I’d rather not be forced to choose between those two (being broke and divorced vs. pretending like so many others that I am not able to see that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment). But if weird circumstances are sometimes going to develop such that those are the two options presented to me, I would like to think that I would follow the course that I have followed every time. No apologies.
I do feel regret over the divorce. But I don’t think that I could ever have it in me to play it the other way given how many millions of people are affected by this in a very serious way. A person is what a person is. I cannot speak for my ex. But, knowing what I know of her and admire about her, I believe that she would have played it the way that I played it if only she had seen everything that I have seen.
I believe that the vast majority of the people of the United States would have played it the way that I have played it had they seen what I have seen. I guess I’m just the lucky one to have seen more of what Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick really is all about at its core!
I certainly do not mesn to suggest that the majority could ever behave in the way in which you Goons have behaved. But we would never have seen so many bannings had the majority not to some extent TOLERATED the behavior of you Goons. That’s the story here. It’s the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse that resides within each and every one of us that makes stocks a far more risky asset class than they would be if we permitted honest discussion of the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research at every site
I don’t see how we can as a people learn how to combat the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse that has done us all so much harm over the years if we don’t first give ourselves permission to acknowledge it and talk about it and explore it in some depth. Irrational exuberance is not going to go away by itself. Stock investors need to do battle with it on a daily basis if they are to achieve their dream of using the peer-reviewed research published in this field to live richer and fuller and freer lives. It’s important.
So I soldier on despite the costs that I have been made to pay in a personal sense by the behavior of you Goons. If you truly believed that the Greaney retirement study contained a valuation adjustment, you never would have advanced a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. I am sure.
Rob
Telling silly stories hasn’t gotten you anywhere.
By the way, you quit your job long before you came up with the Greaney fantasy, so that isn’t a valid excuse.
I left mt corporate job on August 1, 2000. I wrote my first budget in January 1992 with the intention of saving enough money so that I could responsibly leave corporate employment behind and pursue an independent journalism career. In Augest 2000, my intent for my independent journalism career was to wrote reports for the Soapbox.com site. I had written one report while still employed in my corporate job (“Scecrets of Retiring Early”) and it became the #1 best -selling report in the history of the site. I earned $15,000 in six months. That was enough to tell me that it was safe to leave my corporate job since I would be able to write three new reports each year.
In February 2001, Soapbox shut down. So I needed a new plan I decided to blow up the Soapbox report into a full-lenth book, since a book has much more potential to bring in money and to build my reputation than a report. When Greaney freaked out in early 2002 and started driving the best posters off of the Motley Fool board with his abusive posting (stock prices had dropped a bit), I knew that I had to do something to save the board since the board was my “playform” (book publishers want to see that an author has a platform for making sales before offering a book contract). If I was going to sell books about how to achieve financial freedom early in life, I needed to keep that board in operation. The board was at the time the most exciting board on the internet. The priumary reason why my report was the #1 best-selling report was because of the huge support for it at the Retire Early board, where people knew and appreicated my stuff (even Greaney had put up a welcome-to-the-board post at which he advised newcomers to read my stuff first because it was “seminal.”) When he launced his smear campaign to drive Wanderer off the board (Wanderer was at the time the best poster on the board), I knew that I finally had to work up the courage to point out the error in the Greant retirement study (I had been aware of it when I made my first post back in May 1999 but had held back on saying anything for fear of what Greaney and his Goon Squad would direct at me if I pointed out the error).
I couldn’t have done the investing work that I have done over the past 21 years had I not first saved enough (using the principles set forth in my book, “Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work” to be able to leave my corporate job. I responed to thousands and thousands of questions put to me both by Normals and by you Goons in the wake of my famous May 13, 2002, post pointing out the error in the Greaney study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins). I wouldn’t have had time to do that if I had been emlloyed in a corporate job. In susequent years, I developed the five unique calculators housed at my site and write two hundred articles that appear at the site and recorded over 100 RobCasts and wrote hundreds of guest blog entires at other sites and attended five blogger conferences and responded to thousands of comments at this blog and have completed 80 percent of the book that I am writing on investing (“Investing for Humans: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work”).
The aim of my Retire Early plan was to make a shift to independent journalism, work that I would find both more fulfilling and more financal rewarding than the corporate journalism that I have been doing in earlier days. The development and promotion of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept fits that bill to perfection. There is no more important (and in the long run financially rewarding) work being done in the United States today than the work that I am doing to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field). It is my intent to soldier on. I hope that that works for you, Anonymous.
My best wishes, etc.
Rob
“ I earned $15,000 in six months. That was enough to tell me that it was safe to leave my corporate job since I would be able to write three new reports each year.”
And from the start, you were already off track. Your income was at poverty level for a family of 4 an you didn’t even write any new reports. Further, you haven’t put out that book and it is over 20 years. You have taken no action for the last 20 years to correct a plan that was off track from the start. Then you start weaving your whole story around Greaney as a cover story.
The Motley Fool board is and was not your “platform” and it is not “your board”.
So being the one to point out the error in the Greaney retirement study has no financial value in your eyes?
Greaney is not the only one who has pushed the 4 percent rule. it is standard in Buy-and-Hold circles. There have been thousands of newspaper articles that made reference to the rule. There were people at the Motley Fool site who thought it was a real thing. I know. I was there.
And what does it say about Buy-and-Hold in general (and this loony tunes idea that market timing/price discipline is not really necessary) that the Buy-and-Holders for the retirement numbers so wildly wrong? It says that we need to do a rethink of the Buy-and-Hold Model. Valuation-Informed Indexing, which I have been developing since the morning of August 28, 2002, (August 27, 2002, is when Greaney advanced his first death threat and when I saw over 200 Buy-and-Holders endorse it) is the rethink.
If all that ain’t worth a bare minimum of $500 million, I have a hard time imagining what would be worth a bare minimum of $500 million.
Holy moly!
Rob
“The Motley Fool board is and was not your “platform” and it is not “your board”.”
It was in the days before I put up my famous post of May 13, 2002, pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins).
I didn’t sell all of those copies of my “Secrets of Retiring Early” report because I had a nice haircut, It was people from the Motley Fool board who were buying them and then telling their friends about them because they were familier with my stuff.
That board was at one time the most exciting board on the face of the internet. You don’t want to take a look at what it became after Greaney managed to drive away all the good posters. A discussion board without any good posters ain’t worth much. It’s the discussions that are held at a board that make it valuable. Threatening to muder the loved ones of people who offer a different persepctive is not the way to ignite good discussions.
My sincere take.
Rob
“ So being the one to point out the error in the Greaney retirement study has no financial value in your eyes?”
No one, including me, sees any financial value as there is no error. You have been told that thousands of times. If anything, your bad advice on timing is a liability and anyone that would have followed it would be worse off, like you are.
The obvious point here is that all your plans have failed and you never made any effort over a 20 year period to do anything to make any money, while your wife had to work 6 jobs.
Right. The Greaney study really did contain a valuation adjustment all along. I just wasn’t able to make it out because it was in small type.
Makes sense!
Rob
“ Right. The Greaney study really did contain a valuation adjustment all along. I just wasn’t able to make it out because it was in small type.”
Just like the fact that my Tesla does not have a microwave oven.
I wish you the best of luck with your driving experiences in your Tesla, Anonymous.
Best wishes.
Rob